A shop owner was in his house when he heard a heavy cart
rolling outside. Curious, he called one of his servants and asked him to
find out about the cart.

A few minutes later, the servant came back and replied, “The cart is carrying rice sacks.”
“Can you go and find out what they are being sold for?”

A few mins later: “10 gold coins per sack.”
“OK, how much does each rice sack weigh?”

“Oh, I will be right back with the answer.”
And so it went on for a while.

Then the owner called another servant and asked him to inquire about
the cart. The new person went and returned, replying, “The cart is from
two villages away, carrying 50 kilo rice sacks at 10 gold coins each.
The cart owner is willing to accept 8 gold coins each if we buy 20 of
those sacks.”

The moral of the story is clear. The second servant is a much more
useful employee not only because he saves a lot of time, but because he
understands what the owner is interested in and gets the necessary
information. He is, in other words, detail-oriented.

In projects, the amount of pressure and tension associated with
deadlines and quality can be significantly reduced when both managers
and employees pay attention to details and anticipate what customers
need. On the other hand, if they are only doing their job superficially,
things fall into the cracks and escalate into major issues, sooner or
later.

Unfortunately, on the list of personal traits that society places
importance on, being meticulous falls behind on intelligence,
communication, etc. Even though lack of focus usually seems to be a
major cause when it comes to problems. People usually make stupid
decisions not because they (the persons) are stupid, but because they haven’t done enough homework. Or they don’t do something because they just plain forgot.

This is one characteristic that people either have or they really
struggle with. I know managers who are very precise about maintaining
lists and following up. And there are people who have to be constantly
reminded of a single task.

Sometimes, in a situation where you have someone really talented and
capable of producing great work as long as they are focused on it, it
may be worthwhile to doing the “paying attention to details” for them.
So, you have managers worrying about task management, you have business
analysts worrying about requirements specification and you have testers
worrying about all the ways that an application can be broken.
Specialization solves the problem by throwing money at it. So it is
expensive.

Projects would be better served by hiring people who are better at
task management and attention to details while competent at their work.
And by that, I mean something more than asking the person’s
recommendations whether they were good at task management. There should
probably be specific tasks during hiring to evaluate whether people can
pay attention to details.